Let’s make the newest Twins mascot a tray of tater tots

It was brought to my attention on Monday that the Twins are planning to add a new mascot to the Mascot Race at Target Field. Currently, the race features five characters: Babe the Blue Ox, a walleye (she usually wins), a loon, the Target dog, and a mosquito.

The Twins are asking for our input on what the new mascot should be, and here are the choices:

I really wish I was kidding about this, but I’m not.

Out of all the thoughts currently racing through my brain, I wanted to pull out just a few to share with you all:

1. The Duck Duck Gray Duck one is clearly the worst here. How do you even make the concept of Duck Duck Gray Duck a mascot? You’re trying way too hard and need to go back to whatever rural Wisconsin bar you came from, person who thought this might be a viable mascot. If you want to turn Duck Duck Gray Duck into an in-between innings promotion, make people actually play Duck Duck Gray Duck (and, NO, it’s not the same thing as Duck Duck Goose).
2. Bobert is the most aesthetically pleasing mascot out of this hypothetical bunch. This fact also makes Bobert the worst — although, when I showed these to my boyfriend Greg, he immediately asked “what the hell is that one on the left” because he’s from Queens and not Minnesota and legitimately had no idea what Bobert was supposed to be. So Bobert has that going for him.
3. Greg didn’t even know what a loon was when he moved to Minnesota. I had to get drunk and try to make the sound a loon makes to explain it to him. Pretty sure Greg still doesn’t know what a loon is.
4. They named him Bobert. lol.
5. Clearly, the tray of tater tots has to win. It’s supposed to be tater tot hotdish — which I think is most closely associated with Minnesota — but it looks more like just a tray of tater tots. All I see are tater tots, no cream-of-anything in there. However, this is the kind of half-formed idea of a mascot that I would come up with, so I’m team tater tots in a tray all the way. It is also wearing a hat.
6. I didn’t really realize this until right now, but I really want to see someone wearing that tater tot costume driving a Schwan’s truck down Excelsior Blvd.
7. I’m going to openly admit something right now: The first time I ever had a Jucy Lucy was at Target Field in 2010. I got it at Hrbek’s, brought it down to my seat, and bit into it, blissfully unaware that doing so too early sends the cheese in the middle of the patty flying out the other side on to your leg where it burns a nice little hole in your jeans/skin. That game happened to be one of the maybe two games in my life I went to without my Mom and just our White Sox fan friend, and he just stared at me like I was a gigantic idiot, because I am a gigantic idiot. Anyway, if that mascot really has some cheese squirting out of the side of it like in the rendering above then maybe it’d be better than the tater tot chef hat tray. It could be a nice warning to future idiots like me who want to eat their first Jucy Lucy.
8. A Jucy Lucy is a hamburger with some molten cheese in the middle of it, if you’re not from Minnesota and/or didn’t catch that.

If you want to actually vote on one of these mascots you can go here, but you better be voting for the tater tots. They make you enter your full name and address just in case you thought I wouldn’t be able to hunt you down for not voting tater tots.

Really kind of wish they named the Tater Tot mascot Jim, though. I mean,”Tater”? Come on. What are we, five years old?